Hearing two languages while in the womb helps baby bilinguality

Another baby-related post today – it has been found by a team of psychological scientists at the University of British Colombia in Canada that babies born from bilingual families seem more likely to have more of a penchant for picking up spoken languages later on.

Quite how they found the correlation between babies’ “sucking reflexes” and their stimulus for languages, I don’t really understand… but since they’re wearing white lab coats, I am tempted to believe them.

A team of psychological scientists at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in France, watched the sucking reflexes of newborns born to either monolingual English-speaking women, or women who spoke both English and Tagalog, a language native to the Philippines.

The team found that babies born to monolingual mothers exhibited increased sucking behaviors when they heard English, but not Tagalog, while infants born to the bilingual mothers showed interest, regardless of which of the two languages was being spoken.